At the foot of Tianzhu Mountain in Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, there is a village where a group of "new farmers" live. Among them are artists, cultural scholars, and entrepreneurs. This village is the Tailongren Guqin Culture Village of Zhangzhou City. This group of "new peasants" played the piano and made friends to spread the excellent traditional Chinese culture. What they studied, studied and made was one of the oldest stringed instruments in China, the guqin.

The thousand-year-old ancient town is full of music

Guqin is also known as Yaoqin and lyre. According to historical records, the guqin appeared no later than the Yao and Shun periods, and has a history of more than 3,000 years. Guqin ranks first in the four arts of "qin, chess, calligraphy and painting" and is a treasure in my country's traditional music culture. . The seat of a gentleman must be the piano on the left and the writing on the right. Confucius, Cai Yong, Ji Kang, Ouyang Xiu, Su Shi and Fujian's sages such as Su Song, Zhu Xi, Li Zhi, and Huang Daozhou were all good at qin and music.

The guqin style has flourished since Zhangzhou. Not only are guqin images common in the murals, railings, and stone walls of ancient dwellings, palaces, and ancestral halls, but also guqin is inextricably linked with many historical and cultural celebrities. During the Xuanhe period, Zhangzhou Lin Xuji took the qin high school and "rewarded him with playing the qin". During his tenure as the prefect of Zhangzhou, Zhu Xi regarded qin study as an important means to teach the people, which made Zhangzhou "reciting the chorus of every family", and authored a theoretical book on qin theory, "Qin Rhythm". Huang Daozhou and Zheng Chenggong, who had been stationed in Zhangzhou for 16 years, were both masters at playing the piano.

Changtai County, a thousand-year-old ancient city (the county will be relocated to a district in April 2021), has placed great emphasis on the education of qin art since ancient times. According to the records of "Changtai County Chronicle", in the Song Dynasty, Huang Mengyong, the magistrate of Changtai, reorganized several rooms in the east of the county government in the early years of Changtai, and ordered a plaque "Qintang", and wrote "Qintang Ji" saying: " The qin is an object, the body is prepared with the harmony of yin and yang, and the sound reflects the integrity of the palace. In the past, people played drums again and again, and the folk customs and customs did not change.” This explains the influence of the guqin on folk customs and governance. The county annals also recorded the preservation of the qin room, the introduction of qin instruments, the musical scores of the ceremony, etc., all of which reflected the influence and development of the guqin culture in Changtai.

In modern times, influenced by various foreign cultures and modern lifestyles, the guqin enthusiasts became a small group, and the spread of guqin has gradually declined, and it has become an endangered culture. In 2003, Guqin was included in the second batch of representative works of oral and intangible cultural heritage of mankind by UNESCO. In 2006, it was included in the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage list.

In recent years, party committees and governments at all levels have strengthened the inheritance and protection of excellent traditional culture and intangible cultural heritage, and the skills of guqin and qin have gradually recovered and prospered.

The piano skills are born together by Chen Xianxin

Art is born from the qin, and the qin is passed down from the art. The prosperity of guqin culture and art is inseparable from the inheritance of qin craftsmanship.

From ancient times to the present, a large number of qin books have recorded the skills of the qin, not only the processing method of the material, the ingredients of the material, the secret formula, etc., but also the layout and proportion of the qin body. There are standard design requirements. According to statistics, there are as many as 51 styles of guqin-making handed down from ancient times, and the production process includes 12 links and more than 100 steps. Each process must be completed by hand and adjusted according to the actual situation. The complexity of the qin is evident.

For example, the first choice for the qin is selected. The wood of paulownia and cedar is pine and transparent, which is conducive to the resonance of sound, and is the preferred wood for piano making. Cai Yong of the Eastern Han Dynasty heard the sound of paulownia wood cracking in the fire, and felt that what was burning was a good material for making qin. He grabbed the wood from the fire and made the famous qin "Jiaoweiqin". illustration.

However, the guqin made in the past still often suffered from unexpected situations such as body deformation and cracking. Even in contemporary times, under the different climates of the north and south, the guqin still has the problem of deformation and cracking.

Thanks to his early years of wood research, Xie Jiandong, the representative inheritor of the Guqin Making Technique (Changtai), a representative project of Fujian’s intangible cultural heritage, applied wood modification technology to Guqin production while inheriting the ancient craftsmanship to make Guqin. It took four years to improve the quality of piano materials, improve dimensional stability, biological corrosion resistance and weather resistance.

Grooving is the core process of making a guqin, which largely determines the sound quality of a guqin. "There is no absolute standard for the belly. It is necessary to design the corresponding structure according to different panel materials, and then match it with a suitable bottom plate, so as to ensure the pure sound of the piano." Xie Jiandong said.

The reason why a good guqin can be preserved for thousands of years is not only the selection of materials, but also the lacquer. Xie Jiandong said that Guqin uses natural raw lacquer, which is resistant to corrosion, abrasion, water and insulation, and is non-toxic and harmless to the human body. The production of guqin bottom tires requires more than a dozen processes. "After the guqin wood tires are completed, we coat the guqin body with a gray tire blended with raw lacquer and antler cream, and carry out multiple strokes of painting from coarse to fine. It will take nearly two years for the whole process to be painted.”

Winding is the final step in the production process. According to "Changtai County Chronicle", the strings "only use white zhe silk as the top, followed by the original silkworm". However, using silk as strings has a simple and simple sound, but it is easily affected by the environment and out of tune, and is not durable.

Since modern times, steel strings have been gradually replaced by traditional silk strings, which are more durable, but the rest are greasy and long with metallic sounds, losing their primitive charm.

In order to match the guqin with good strings, Xie Jiandong organized many scholars, pianists and related technicians to jointly develop the "Dragon Man Bingxian". "Dragon Man Ice String" is made of high-strength synthetic fiber silk, real silk and nylon silk. This innovation has won the national invention patent and is highly praised by the industry.

In 2017, Guqin production skills (Changtai) were included in the representative project of Fujian provincial intangible cultural heritage.

The new look of the times brings forth the new

Around this year's "Cultural and Natural Heritage Day", teachers and students from Zhangzhou No. 1 Middle School, No. 3 Middle School, Gaoxin Vocational Technical School and Guangzhou No. 97 Middle School carried out various Mongolian learning, research and teaching activities in Longren Guqin Cultural Village. Xie Jiandong has insisted on organizing such activities for ten years.

"Fujian guqin has a profound cultural history, and it has emerged in different historical periods. How to make the guqin better inherit and develop in the present? This is the direction we are striving for." In 2010, Xie Jiandong built the Longren Guqin Cultural Village at the foot of Tianzhu Mountain in Changtai National Forest Park, where a group of like-minded qin people started a new exploration of the inheritance and innovation of qin skills and the dissemination of guqin culture.

Changtai District also carries out the inheritance and promotion of guqin culture from the aspects of guqin production, guqin research, university cooperation, non-genetic inheritance, art communication, and cultural exchanges at home and abroad, and supports Longren Guqin Cultural Village to build national guqin cultural exchanges base.

The 11 Longren Guqin Cultural Seasons and the Cross-Strait Guqin Cultural and Creative Competition have been held here successively, promoting cultural exchanges between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait.

In 2015, Changtai Guqin represented traditional Chinese music art at the Milan World Expo in Italy; in 2022, Xie Jiandong's three-bed Guqin works were collected by the China Arts and Crafts Museum and the China Intangible Cultural Heritage Museum; in the same year, Zhangzhou Longren Art and Literature Vocational Technical School It was approved to be established, and the inheritance of Guqin culture entered vocational education.

With the piano as an intermediary, the heart is free to travel. The beauty of the guqin lies in its shape, its timbre, and its artistic conception. Every string and every note carries the spirit and connotation of culture. "More and more people are aware of Guqin culture and begin to learn Guqin." Xie Jiandong said, "The country pays more and more attention to traditional culture, which gives us more confidence to pass on Guqin culture from generation to generation."